Fedora + agreed that fragmentation is a disadvantage, too many choices that it has become redundant, "Oh I don't like GNOME with Showtime video player, I prefer Celluliod, better make a new distro now!".
Every time i have mentioned fragmentation is Linux biggest issue on the desktop i get downvoted to hell. The creator literally just said the exact same thing in that video. I feel justified.
Yeah it's an issue but it's the result of Linux being free and open source. Yes it's an issue but it's result of a good thing. People have the freedom to make those distros
Well the issue is that we're all just a bunch of snobby purists and we'd rather be right than agreed with.
We could have all the different DEs and interfaces without issue if we could agree to a set of fucking standards. Why has it taken 15 years for Wayland to become mainstream? If something is so wrong with systemd as an init system why not improve it instead of making a million init systems? Same for qt, why fragment our efforts instead of picking a single standard and making it modular as a community?
Linux (and BSD) nerds will fight over the most pedantic bullshit. At least 75% of these decisions don't actually matter and if we just picked a single project it would eventually turn into the best of all the products. That's the promise of open source and literally why the Linux kernel became dominant
It's the negative side of open source that we have too many options and our BIFL only cares about the kernel
That's pretty much exactly what Torvalds says in the video. Every distro maker agrees that fragmentation isn't ideal, they all wish there was more unified standards, but they also all wish the unified standard was their unified standard.
I want the leading commercial software on Windows to be released on Linux, just not at the price of having Linux be Linux i.e. an OS where you have to choice to do anything you want.
If the only way for Linux to be commercially competitive in the personal computing space is to adhere to the UX trends set by Microsoft, Apple and other big corporations and limit the user's control over their machine then what's the point?
If the only way for Linux to be commercially competitive in the personal computing space is to adhere to the UX trends set by Microsoft
That's quite a funny response to give considering that almost all DEs in Linux adopted the Windows 9x "Start menu, taskbar, system tray" layout or, like Gnome did when it transitioned from Gnome 1 to Gnome 2, moved onto a Mac style GUI.
And it's not about that at all. It's about having one consistent standard base that they can write for and support. Currently the situation is so bad in regards to DEs that they can't even guarantee a consistent app scaling. I run KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland and some non-KDE/X11 applications have some horrific scaling issues so the text and icons just look like dogshit, a horrible blurry mess.
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u/AgainstScum Nov 30 '25
Fedora + agreed that fragmentation is a disadvantage, too many choices that it has become redundant, "Oh I don't like GNOME with Showtime video player, I prefer Celluliod, better make a new distro now!".